The goal of this blog is to help you hold your own in political discussions--especially when the other guy's fighting dirty. Some dirty tricks are obvious, others are subtle. But even when they're blatant it can be hard to know what to say. I'll help. I lean Democrat myself, but I'm as against Democrats using underhanded tactics as I am against Republicans doing so. Fair is fair, and this blog aims to help anyone who shares this belief.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

The NRA Fake Fact Factory is working three shifts!

Anytime there's a mass murder committed with assault weapons, the gun lobby's Fake Fact Factory kicks into high gear, cranking out the same sort of supposedly accurate information that the cigarette industry put out for decades in its successful effort to protect its equally deadly profits.

The irony is that the gun lobby--through its political wing, AKA the Republican Party--has effectively banned agencies of the federal government from studying gun violence or even reporting the statistical data accumulated.

Using private research, though, you can draw some conclusions:

1. Almost every single thing a gun rights advocate says is factually incorrect.

2. Guns turn violence into homicide.

3. Assault weapons turn homicide into mass murder.

Here's the c>>onclusion of FactCheck.org, the most reputable nonpartisan factchecking organization:

>>among advanced countries, the U.S. homicide rate stands out. “We seem to be an average country in terms of violence and aggression,” says Harvard’s Hemenway. “What we have is huge homicide rates compared to anybody else.”

Says Wintemute: “The difference is that in this country violence involves firearms and firearms change the outcome.”<<

http://factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/

The gun lobby and its shills tools also make mathematically impossible claims about all the lives saved by defensive gun use. Turns out the hundreds of thousands they cite are more like a few hundred (compared to the 10,000 lives lost because of our gun culture). The most popular fake "study" (which turns out to be a methodologically invalid survey by a gun nut with a PhD) was subjected to a statistical analysis by people who actually understand statistics, and ripped it to probabalistic shreds:

ScienceBlogs: How many lives are saved by defensive gun use?
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/1994/10/19/dgu-00007/